Why are black uniforms more scary?

As the UK Border Force unveils a new look, Luke Leitch ponders why dark
uniforms make their wearers look more sinister

Darth Vader: the Border Force is strong in this one

By Luke Leitch

7:00AM GMT 16 Mar 2014

Last week at Heathrow, my usual passport-queue shuffle through the cordon hairpins was spent in a state of high anticipation – because I’d heard that theUK Border Forcehas a new uniform. Instead of pale shirts, our national gatekeepers now wear extremely dark ''border blue’’ shirts – a shade so dark as to seem almost black even under airport lighting – with epaulettes, trousers, jumpers and the rest all in precisely the same shade.

What, I asked the man as he stared doubtfully at my passport picture, did he think of the five-day-old threads?

“Well,” he replied: “The material is better, and it’s better made, too – the new uniform is definitely a better quality than previously. But I’m not sure if I like this all-dark look.”

An acquaintance who works in the border corps – and who tipped me off about the new uniform – put it a little more strongly on the phone a few days earlier: “I worry it makes us look a bit Nazi.”

Unfortunately, this uniform is so new that the Home Office – which spent over £1 million on the updated kit in December alone – doesn’t yet have a picture of it. But as I assured my friend later, it doesn’t make him look specifically Nazi. What the all dark look does do, however, is transmit a message of potential aggression that some people find sinister.

In the US, where urban police forces tend to favour all dark clothes, studies have shown that the darker the law enforcement uniform, the scarier the enforcer. According to an article in theFBI Law Enforcement Bulletinin 2001 by an associate professor in the criminal justice department at Toledo University: “Darker uniforms may send negative sub-conscious signals to citizens. A dark uniform may subconsciously encourage citizens to perceive officers as aggressive, evil, or corrupt and send a negative message to the community.”

The article cited an experiment in which the subjects were tested for their reaction to two uniforms; one all dark-blue, the other a sheriff-style dark trouser and khaki shirt combination. “Although subjects ranked both uniforms similarly as good, honest, helpful, and competent, the lighter coloured sheriff’s uniform rated noticeably higher for warmth and friendliness. Because the sheriff’s uniform only has a light-coloured shirt, with the pants still very dark, a half-dark uniform sends a better message than the all dark blue or black uniform.”

Playing dirty: Burt Reynolds in The Mean Machine (1974)

Another study has suggested that a Darth Vader-dark ensemble is likely to muddy the behaviour of those who wear it. According to research from Cornell University in a 1988 edition of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, American football teams that switched to a black uniform immediately gave away more penalties – both because their players’ behaviour was more aggressive, and, it speculated, because that colour made the referees expect them to play dirtily.

As the article put it: “This finding can be attributed to both social perception and the self-perception process – that is, to the biased judgments of referees and to the increased aggressiveness of the players.”

Members of the newly rebranded UK Border Agency – of which the Border Force is one half along with Immigration Enforcement – have a vital job to do in the face of consistent cuts and criticism. According to the Home Office, the new uniform “reflects the law enforcement and security ethos of Border Force and its role in protecting the UK border”.

Let’s hope that the change in colour of their shirts – which you’ll see next time you come back into Britain – won’t encourage them to be anything but neutral.